Adam Summers: This Afghanistan aid program not worth a hill of beans

In many ways, Afghans are just like Americans. For example, it turns out that they don’t like the government telling them what to eat, either. That has not stopped the U.S. government from wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on trying.

In a new investigative report, the Center for Public Integrity described the folly of the $34.4 million Soybeans for Agricultural Renewal in Afghanistan Initiative, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of the Afghanistan reconstruction effort. The idea seemed like a good one at the time: Many Afghans are poor and malnourished, so soybeans could help to provide more protein in their diets. The American Soybean Association eagerly signed on to implement the program.

But since its launch in 2010, the program has been plagued by lost crops, a lack of planning, weather patterns not conducive to growing soybeans, a dearth of leadership, the high turnover of chief agronomists and security concerns. The most glaring problem, however, was that Afghans simply don’t like the taste of soybean products. While the program had established a goal of getting more than 100 naan (Afghan bread) bakeries in Mazar-e-Sharif to utilize soy flour, only 10 bakeries were using it as of May 2013.

The program’s failure was due, in part, to the U.S. government’s overbearing attitude that “we know what’s best for Afghans,” Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko told AFP. “We came up with a brilliant idea, but we never talked to the Afghans. The Afghans don’t grow it, they don’t like it, they don’t eat it, there’s no market for it.”

Many of the soybean program’s obstacles might have been anticipated by a feasibility study, but the USDA never asked for one, and the ASA never saw fit to conduct one. The British did do their homework, though. A 2008 feasibility study compiled for the main British foreign aid organization and obtained by CPI concluded that “the crop production cycle and available water means that soybeans do not fit profitably into the Afghan farming system,” and “strongly advise[d] against any further encouragement of farmers growing soybeans in Afghanistan.”

The report noted that many government agencies “have been approached by people wanting to promote soybean production,” but cautioned that such efforts would be a “waste of development funding.”

And no war-reconstruction waste story would be complete without an element of cronyism. The ASA and the big agribusiness companies are well-connected in Washington, D.C. According to the CPI article, “[The ASA’s] annual conference in Washington, typically held at a hotel on Capitol Hill and co-hosted with agricultural giants such as Cargill, Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, regularly attracts foreign aid officials from USDA and other agencies.” So it should come as little surprise that the ASA was a key player in pushing and running the program, or that the USDA purchased 80 tons of soy flour for the program from Cargill in December 2010.

The ASA’s demands even prompted nonprofit group Nutrition and Education International, whose founder, food biochemist Dr. Steven Kwon, had originally come up with the idea for the soybean program, to pull out of the project when it stipulated that Afghan farmers must sell all their soybeans to the processing factory, rather than using the harvest to feed their families.

The soybean program money was also used to build a $1.5 million factory in Mazar-e-Sharif, but in 2013 Afghan soybean farmers produced less than 3 percent of the necessary crop. This has prompted the program to import 4,000 metric tons of soybeans from the U.S. at a cost of more than $2 million.

The soybean program is just one of many colossal failures and examples of senseless waste in the Afghanistan reconstruction endeavor. Others include a $300 million power plant that the Afghan government does not have the expertise to run, $626 million in weapons and auxiliary equipment (mostly small arms) – about 43 percent of which cannot be accounted for – hundreds of buildings constructed by the Army that fail to meet international building codes, and a $34 million 64,000-square-foot headquarters facility at Camp Leatherneck in southwest Afghanistan that the military never wanted and likely will never use.

The Afghan soybean program’s recipe for failure is a familiar one in Washington: start with some paternalistic hubris, throw in some cronyism, add a dash of governmental inefficiency and mix in a lack of oversight. In all, Congress has appropriated about $103 billion for the Afghanistan reconstruction effort, with approximately $18 billion as yet unspent. A 2011 U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated waste and fraud from war contracting in the tens of billions of dollars.

These examples should put to rest the notion that the “defense” budget is sacrosanct and immune from the same sorts of waste and inefficiency as other government programs – and we already knew the USDA is rife with cronyism, unnecessary subsidies and other profligacy. Just as voters and politicians should not fall for the crocodile tears of those who cry that education spending must forever be increased “for the children!” they also should not be cowed into turning a blind eye to the defense budget, lest they incur the charge of not “supporting the troops!” For whether it is soybeans or unused buildings, you can rest assured that the government is spending large sums of money somewhere on something that is neither needed nor desired.

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